Video – How to Hire and Mange a Virtual Assistant with oDesk

Hire and Manage a Virtual Assistant Using oDesk

I’ve had a lot of success hiring and managing virtual assistants using oDesk. In this post I’ll show you exactly the steps I go through to effectively find and hire the right person every time.

I really like oDesk the best. I have tried all the major oursourcing sites, such as Elance.com and Guru.com, but I feel that oDesk has the greatest number of highest-qualified contractors for my needs.

In our local tech startup group here in San Diego, we’ve been talking a lot about hiring assistance for tasks that are perfect for a virtual assistant, such as:

Researching and finding similar blogs/websites to a particular keyword or keyword phrase

Finding contacts at a list of companies and dropping them into a spreadsheet

Coordinating actions among a group of contractors

Pinning, liking, tweeting

For more examples, look at this article that gives lots of great ideas that you can get help with for a few dollars per hour:

If you’ve been thinking about hiring a virtual assistant, but thought the process could be challenging, I have made this video to help demystify the process and take you from signup to hire in a few minutes. I hope it really helps you.

In this video, I’ll cover:

– How to sign up and immediately start browsing candidates
– How to quickly choose the right candidates based on your needs from the thousands of options
– How to write and post a very effective job requisition that targets only the contractors you are looking to attract
– How to submit your job to the best contractors for their consideration.

In the next two videos, I’ll cover how to:
– Pick the best applicant once you have received a lot of interest and
– How to effectively manage your remote team with very little effort using free online tools

I’ll even interview a VA who was hired on oDesk and ask her what she’s looking for in a client – contractor relationship and what the best forms of communication are to minimize misunderstandings and maximize job task clarity.

Thanks for watching. If there’s something you’d like to see, please let me know in the comments.

Join the discussion 11 Comments

The problem with oDesk is their customer support. I’ve read a lot from the internet and also hear from other businessman that whenever issues occur especially the “heavy” ones, oDesk wouldn’t address it properly.

What I like about remotestaff is that they provided me my own customer support representative so everytime I have questions or issues to resolve with my staff I would just call them. They would also send me daily reports through email and contact me through phone whenever necessary.

I don’t have to monitor my staff every minute just to make sure they are being productive – they do the job for me 🙂

We’ve been advocating the idea of “test driving” a contractor relationship for years. Here’s the nutshell: Before you hire someone for a job that will span 100 hours, hire her to a two- or three-hour test job that lets you assess her skills, timeliness and communication style. Or test several top candidates and then hire the best for that major project. In general, you get the best return on that investment if the test job is work of actual value — something you can use, rather than merely a skills test.

Great point, Latasha. I couldn’t agree more, especially where you mention ‘actual value’. I find that most contractors I talk with are not only open to it, but are now expecting a trial period, making the hiring process that much easier.
Thanks for the tip! -Zank

There are hundreds of thousands of contractors available to tackle whatever job you need to hire for. But you don’t want thousands of workers — you want one stellar one, who offers the best combination of experience, reliability and affordability. But, as the employer, you are competing for the attention of those top contractors, and you’ve got to write a killer job description to ensure that their applications head to your inbox.